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Editorial: Obama administration too secretive

Last Modified: Monday, June 10, 2013 9:44 AM

Everyone understands the need for government to keep national security secrets. But the Obama administration continues to
go to extraordinary lengths to keep the American people from knowing about their political decision making process.

For example, it was recently revealed
that President Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for
Health and
Human Services, are using secret government email accounts they
say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed
with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated
Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists
of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months
ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

The AP asked for the addresses
following last year’s disclosures that the former administrator of the
Environmental Protection
Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is
separate from officials who use personal, non-government
email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged — but
often happens anyway — due to laws requiring that most federal
records be preserved. The secret email accounts complicate an
agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails
in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil
lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned
to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about
the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions
that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.

“What happens when that person doesn’t work there anymore? He leaves and someone makes a request (to review emails) in two
years,” said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, an open government group. “Who’s going to
know to search the other accounts? You would hope that agencies doing this would keep a list of aliases in a desk drawer,
but you know that isn’t happening.”

Agencies where the AP so far has
identified secret addresses, including the Labor Department and Health
and Human Services
(HHS), said maintaining non-public email accounts allows senior
officials to keep separate their internal messages with agency
employees from emails they exchange with the public. They also
said public and non-public accounts are always searched in
response to official requests and the records are provided as
necessary..

Courts have consistently set a high
bar for the government to withhold public officials’ records under the
federal privacy
rules. A federal judge, Marilyn Hall Patel of California, said in
August 2010 that “persons who have placed themselves in
the public light” — such as through politics or voluntarily
participation in the public arena — have a “significantly diminished
privacy interest than others.” Her ruling was part of a case in
which a journalist sought FBI records, but was denied.

Obama pledged during his first week in
office to make government more transparent and open. The nation’s
signature open-records
law, he said in a memo to his Cabinet, would be “administered with
a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

The American people have a right to know why and how the government policies are made, and they are not getting the information
that they have a right to from the Obama administration. People need to hold their government officials accountable, from
the president own down.

• • •

This editorial was written by a member of the American Press Editorial Board. Its content reflects the collaborative opinion of the Board, whose members include Bobby Dower, Jim Beam, Crystal Stevenson and Donna Price.